Absolution
by dharmamonkey
Summary: "How many kills do you have?" Hodgins asked Booth. In this oneshot, Booth reflects on the lives he's taken over the years and how far he's willing to go to stop Pelant. Episode tag "Corpse in the Canopy" (8x12).


**Absolution**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rated:** T  
**Disclaimer:** I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.

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"How many kills do you have?"

I took a sharp breath and I felt it hitch hard in my throat as Hodgins' words echoed in my mind.

Yes, I've killed people. A lot of people. I had the blood of more than fifty men on my hands before my boots ever hit the ground in Afghanistan, and by the time that Air Force C-17 pulled up its wheels to send me home, I had another two dozen men's lives to answer for. Their blood is a stain on my hands that I'll carry with me until the day I meet my maker.

Hodgins looked back at me and his words hung in the air like smoke as I felt a wave of nausea roll through me.

His blue eyes were wide with fear and bright with anger. I know what it's like to feel that way—to know that some sick fuck had threatened the people I love and to be so filled with indignant rage that I wanted nothing more than to tear him apart with my bare hands. I know that feeling. I know that fear, that rage, that helplessness.

As God is my witness, I do.

But I also know what it's like to kill a man. I know what it's like to watch a man's life blood pulse out of him and soak into the thirsty sand. I've stood over a man whose chest has been shredded by buckshot after I unloaded my 12-gauge into him and watched his chest move in broken, ragged heaves as he struggled for his last breath. I've stared into lifeless eyes that stared back with a frozen, unforgiving glare. I've picked up the piece of spent brass off the ground and felt the empty casing burn into my palm knowing that just moments before, I'd pulled the trigger and sent its 150-grain payload a thousand meters downrange to blow the back of another man's head off. I still wake up some nights hearing the sound of the music as a murmur on the edges of a memory as I see a little boy with a blood-splattered face stand helplessly over the man I killed as bits of his father's brains clung to his floppy brown bangs. These images will be with me the rest of my life.

And I know that no matter how many times I knelt in the confessional and crossed myself, pouring my heart out in penitent anguish to a priest who prescribes penance and absolves me of my sin on behalf of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, I still feel the stain of having taken human life as a deep mark on my soul. The fact is, it never gets easier. The heaviness I feel knowing that I have killed never really lifts. It gets easier to bear the weight of what I've done, but the act itself never gets easier, and the knowledge of it never really washes away, no matter how many years pass or how many lives I save in the meantime doing the work that I do.

I saw the fear in Hodgins' eyes and I saw the anger in the way his cheek ticked as he asked me how many kills I had. I've been where he is and I know that feeling—the rage that comes when everything you love in the world is threatened. I've felt that killing rage.

I remember standing in an alley in Little Salvador and shoving the barrel of my .357 Magnum down another man's throat and feeling the indignant rage burning in my veins as I watched his nostrils flare with fear. I can hear the way he choked as I pressed the muzzle against his hard palate knowing how it would hurt, and I can still feel the way his Adam's apple rubbed against the side of my thumb as I held his face so hard I left white little imprints on his cheek where my fingers had been. "Look at my face," I'd said, my jaw shifting a little as I watched his eyes widen at the sound of me thumbing back the hammer of my revolver. "If anything happens to her, I will kill you. This is between you and me, and nobody sees, nobody knows." I remember how every muscle in my body felt tense, drawn as tight as a bow, and how my own heart pounded in my chest as I stood on the edge of my own humanity.

I've been in that place where the fear and the rage had washed over me to the point where, at least for a moment, I was willing to kill a man on my own account.

The memory of that day and the face of that man, Ortez, flashed before my eyes when Hodgins asked me how many kills I had. In a way, I feel as stained by the memory of that killing rage as I am by the more than seventy-five lives I've taken, more so even, because for all the contrition and penance I've done over the years, the only absolution that ever felt real to me was the knowledge that while I had taken life, the decision to take those lives was made by a conscience greater than my own.

The thought of it still scares the shit out of me. If I had killed Ortez, how would that have made me any different than Broadsky, who fought his own private little war against evil, drawing battle lines of his own making and meting out justice according to a law bounded only by his own morality, a law which justified the murder of innocent men as the means to an end? The difference between what he did and what I was all too ready to do was only one of degree, and it terrifies me to think that there is a killing rage inside of me that might have made me into a vigilante like the man who murdered Vincent Nigel-Murray.

The only way I can live with what I have done, knowing that I will undoubtedly have to do it again, is to know that the men I have killed were killed by necessity after due consideration of all available options by a decisionmaking apparatus bigger than me. The process and the chain of command is the only thing that keeps me—a man who has killed—from being a killer. It's the only way I can live with the stain of having taken as many lives I have. It is the only thing that absolves me of the sin of killing.

When Hodgins asked me how many kills I had, his words cut me. The casualness of the way he called them "kills" made me want to hit him, if only for a second. I felt my jaw clench tight as the words echoed in my ears and I felt my temples ache as my chest tensed at the implication that the lives I'd taken meant nothing to me.

"My kills were battlefield decisions, alright?" I said, biting out each word as I felt resentment and fear rising like bile in my throat. "There was green light from above. There's a chain of command."

I couldn't go there. I just couldn't.

I hate Pelant. I hate him for taking my family away from me, tearing them away from me for three months—three long months that I'll never, ever get back—but even then, after all the suffering he's put all of us through, I am not going to let him take away our humanity. The price of taking another man's life is steep enough without losing yourself. I know that if we turn our back on the system and become vigilantes, we will become the kind of killers we've each devoted our lives to stopping.

"We stay in the system," I told them.

Because if the only way to end this is to kill Pelant, the system itself will be our only absolution.

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A/N: _So that was a little dark, but hopefully not overly so. When I heard Hodgins' line in that opening scene, it seared me. I for one am looking forward to seeing how the Pelant arc plays out as the season goes on._

_I know this was short, but I hope you found it of value anyway._

_Please let me know what you think. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Please leave a review._

_Thanks for reading!_


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